Some Conclusions

1781 portrait of Robinson by George Romney.

Lyrical Tales, like Robinson body of work as a whole, engages with several modes of representation in the interest of garnering commercial success, earning artistic approbation, and expressing her social and political ideals. In the wake of the Reign of Terror and the Della Cruscans' plunge into disrepute, she is able to re-invent herself one more time, managing the difficult trick of aligning herself with what will never quite be a unified movement.  Especially with some judicious selection for the major anthologies, her work in the collection can be easily incorporated into the canon of early English Romanticism. But in accomplishing this redress of past injustice, too often the aspects that made Robinson's position unique and illustrative of a particular historical-cultural moment are shunted aside. Rather than thinking of the poets of sensibility primarily as Romantic precursors, we must consider their work in its own right, emerging out of a complex discursive field and the varied intentions of writers and publishers. Often, it is useful to focus on the aspects of their work that are at odds with the more famous poets of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, without echoing those writers' dismissals of what may seem to be "slight" and "minor" works. In Robinson's case, this means reconciling a vast array of tones and subjects, tied together by often subtle nods to her larger purposes. What we gain from this is a greater awareness of "sensibility" and "Romanticism" as themselves "poetical disguises": sets of rhetorical and stylistic maneuvers setting forth certain ideological agendas. A poet like Robinson reveals the degree to which sensibility and Romanticism are slightly different points on the same continuum, and the role-playing that is essential to each.

Inventing the Romantic Poet in Lyrical Tales

1784 portrait of Robinson by Joshua Reynolds.

Robinson's Lyrical Tales serves as her bid to be perceived as part of the rising avant-garde of the Lake Poets (who had not yet been identified as such, much less as the English Romantics). She had previously proven her skill at composing "legitimate sonnets" and engaging with the drama of the Della Cruscans, but she now sought to establish herself among the young upstarts by treating similar subject matter, and doing so with impressive technical virtuosity. For Curran, what is notable about Lyrical Tales "is the way in which its abundance of voices, modes of representation, and fertile creativity collide with its sense of a continual thwarting of potentiality to accomplish a thematic tension between means and ends, past and future consummation and consumption characteristic of the greatest Romantic poetry" (WIlson 26). Those contraries emerge as Robinson takes on a number of her “poetical disguises,” or, more correctly, draws on several different literary modes in order to achieve her artistic, political, and economic goals for her work. She sets out to develop the ideology set forth in earlier works like Sappho and Phaon and the Letter to the Women of England, demonstrating the poet's awareness of higher truths and ability to serve as a spur to social progress. 

An 1802 print of Lascar officers by Charles Gold, a member of the Royal Artillery.

To that end, Robinson often draws on already-familiar traditions, as when she uses Della Cruscan sentimentality to promote liberal political causes in her portraits of "The Lascar" and "The Negro Girl." The poet depicts vaguely exotic, but pathetic figures, stripped of love and home, their last hopes crushed by the end of the poem. The "Negro Girl," Zelma, pines for her lost love, Draco (who, we learn in the final stanza, has drowned at sea) and complains of the injustices done to her people.She looks out upon a slave ship that "has oft plough'd the main/With human traffic fraught;/Its cargo,--our dark Sons of pain--/For worldly treasure bought" (109). The deep emotion and suffering of the exploited Africans is contrasted with the unfeeling world of post-Enlightenment Europe, personified in the "Tyrant WHITE MAN" (111). The girl's master is portrayed as possessing the advantages of reason and knowledge, teaching her to read, but lacking the human sympathy to care for the pain he has caused her. The similarly forlorn Lascar longs for his "Indian home" and mother as he starves and dies in the West. He complains, "I sleep upon a bed of stone,/I pace the meadows, wild--alone!/And if I curse my fate severe,/Some Christian savage mocks my tear!"  (32) As Robinson plays her role as the sentimentalist poet, she invites her readers to identify with the "noble savage."


Curran suggests that, beyond the religious and political traditions they are built upon, the poets of sensibility's concern with such down-trodden figures can tell us much about their own position. The impulse that brings someone like Robinson to write on the types of subjects with the range of voices she does is tied to her social status and the resulting alienation from a sense of self. He argues the "void of signification" that exists "at the center of sensibility should alert us to a profound awareness among these poets of being themselves dispossessed, figured through details they do not control, uniting an unstructurable longing of sensibility with the hard-earned sense of thingness" (Curran 205). It is important to keep in mind, however, that the indeterminacy of Robinson's identity in her work, like the seemingly unrelenting sorrow in Charlotte Smith's sonnets, is wielded as an artistic and commercial implement by the poet. Both writers' lives can be read as narratives of brilliant, talented women, profoundly let down by the men in their lives. But their ability to craft affecting work that fills carefully considered niches suggests a fully-realized, and carefully-controlled sense of self.

1792 cartoon by George Cruikshank attacking the slave trade.

Robinson's conception of her own role, coupled with her desire to join her name to the burgeoning rolls of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, is perhaps clearest in "The Poor, Singing Dame." She relates the tale of an old woman (named Mary), who enjoys singing and dancing in the shadow of a curmudgeonly Lord's castle. The impoverished, physically-feeble artist is made the thoroughly feminine heroine of sensibility. Seeing her, "Envy the Lord of the Castle possess'd,/For he hated Poverty should be so chearful,/While care could the fav'rites of Fortune molest" (19). The artist of sensibility's pleasures, gained through acts of creation and her profound ties to nature are privileged above economic and political power. The authoritarian figure can only react by restraining and snuffing out a happiness that transcends the customary power relations. Lacking access to the discourse of sensibility, he must bring her into line with the hegemony that validates his power by having her imprisoned, which results in her death.  Mary's bond with nature is emphasized, not only when she frolics through the forest, but in its sublime aspect as it turns on her enemy. Though she does not seem to take any direct action against him, nature expresses its disapproval of the Lord's crime: "His bones began wasting, his flesh was decaying,/And he hung his foul head, and he perish'd in shame" (21)  With the suggestion that his death is mainly the result of his own shame and misery, the Gothic elements in the poem are kept in a vaguely psychological space. The feudal imagery and supernatural events serve the poem's purposes, but do not become the narrative preoccupation.

Elsewhere, however, Robinson's use of the Gothic is an aspect of her work that sets her significantly apart from the Lake poets. They, of course, also frequently called upon Gothic imagery and conventions in their poems, in spite of the disclaimer from Wordsworth in his 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants" (xv). In poems like "The Thorn" and "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," Wordsworth was careful to place the Gothic trappings in the minds of his superstitious rural folk. Coleridge maintained an undercurrent of irony as he constructed his Gothic masterpieces. As they do, Robinson sees the potential in the imagery of superstition for gestures toward transcendent experience. She takes advantage of the Gothic's liminal status in the Memoirs, which, as Linda Peterson has noted, are themselves an "illustrat[ion of] a woman writer's attempt to participate in Romantic myths of authorship" (Wilson 36). Robinson writes of Westminster Abbey, "I have often remained in the gloomy chapels of that sublime fabric till I became as it were an inhabitant of another world. The dim light of the Gothic windows, the vibration of my footsteps along the lofty aisles, the train of reflections the scene inspired, were all suited to the temper of my soul."


But Robinson shows in the Lyrical Tales that she is capable of embracing the Gothic without the ambivalence that the male poets experienced. The mode provides a site in which the woman writer is free to explore the anxieties of her second-class condition in the social order, living under the power of exploitative male authority. Her "Swiss tale," "Golfre" explores this potential, seemingly reveling in the gore and playing up the treatment of women as victims in the Gothic narrative. "The dove-eyed Zorietto/A damsel blest with ev'ry grace" possesses little in the way of personality (182). Nonetheless, her position as a poor, rural woman forced to fill the domestic role demanded by a rich, powerful man possesses significant connotations in the context of Robinson's biography and feminist positions. As the feminist critic Eugenia Delamotte succinctly puts it, "Most of these [Gothic] books are about women who just can't seem to get out of the house" (10). Robinson may not revolutionize the form, but the supernatural world offers a justice that rarely comes about in her more naturalistic work. She describes in gruesome detail the villain's fate when "The rosy dawn's returning light/Display'd his corse,--a dreadful sight,/Black, wither'd, smear'd with gore!" (217) Similarly, the murderer in "The Haunted Beach" finds himself "Bound by a strong and mystic chain" (76). The influence of Coleridge's Rime is apparent in both these works, but where Coleridge depicted a world ruled by implacable and largely senseless forces, Robinson creates more conventional plots. Whether there is "too much" or "too little" of morality in Robinson's works, there is little questioning of the nature of the moral: abuse of power and ruthless acquisitiveness are evil and shall be punished.


More problematic for some critics are Robinson's comic depictions of the rural poor in poems like "Mistress Gurton's Cat," "The Granny Grey," and "Deborah's Parrot." Unlike Wordsworth, who sought wisdom in romanticized glimpses of more "natural" lives, Robinson offers humorous ballads that seem to lack such pretensions. Much closer in social-economic status to those "common" people than the Lake Poets, she tends to depict them as buffoons, given to self-righteous posturing and infidelity. Poems like these have tended to lead critics to concur with Coleridge's assessment of Robinson, based on her newspaper work, as having mind full of "the bad, good, and indifferent." Pascoe suggests that these works, originally published in the Morning Post under the name Tabitha Bramble "and evincing a folksy, often antifeminist sensibility--can be read as bits of comic business meant primarily, if not solely, to amuse" (266). Certainly, as is the case throughout Robinson's body of work, role-playing and commercial considerations are both part of the equation. Nonetheless, some further examination of these "bits of comic business" is warranted.


When contextualized within Robinson's biography and principles, the poems take on weightier aspects. A poem like "Deborah's Parrot" makes light of an old woman "doom'd a Spinster pure to be" (97). As originally published under the Tabitha Bramble signature, the "Village Tale" offers problematic mockery of a de-sexualized and judgmental figure. But given Mary Robinson's history as a character in political cartoons and the foremost example of the Prince's wayward deeds, the closing message that "SLANDER turns on its maker" gathers greater resonance (106). Indeed, rather than simply pandering to readers' desire for amusements, Robinson often enacts a subversive agenda in these seemingly inoffensive poems. On one hand, "The Confessor" (sarcastically subtitled, "A Sanctified Tale") participates in a long tradition of anti-clerical and anti-Catholic satire, its objects set safely in the time "When SUPERSTITION rul'd the land/And Priestcraft shackled Reason" (149). Yet it is clear, especially when the poem is read in conjunction with her comments on the importance of democratizing learning in the Sappho and Phaon preface, that the kinds of "Pious fraud" she mocks are a continuing problem, connected to the patriarchal order that keeps most women silent. In some cases, changes to the newspaper text are made to adapt to the more serious intentions of the book, as when she adds (or restores) two lines to the first stanza of "The Fortune-Teller." The version published in the April 12th, 1800 edition of the Post ends, "The silly, simple, doting Lad/Was little less than loving mad." The Lyrical Tales version adds another couplet, offering a jab at the upper classes: "A malady not known of late--/Among the little-loving Great!" (129) 


Robinson's purpose, ultimately, is to attack sanctimony and hypocrisy in all forms and at all class levels. In the place of an exploitative and repressive social order, she promotes a feminized ideology of sensibility. The romantic depiction of the poet as an inspired visionary capable of perceiving a utopian future for humanity lends credence to the idea that work like hers will be able to help bring about substantive change. The varied approaches to subject matter and poetical voices in Lyrical Tales coalesce in an idealized construction of the poet: engaged with nature, sensitive to the struggles of the powerless, and commanding beautiful ideals with the aesthetic flourishes made possible by a well-trained ear. In Mary Robinson, we see the birth of the Romantic poet, but it is never as simple as that. Her rhetorical strategy, as well as her awareness of her audience, leads her to dwell on the foolishness, suffering, and failure endemic to our corrupted world, even as she seeks hints of a better way of life for herself and her readers. 

Works Cited

Curran, Stuart. "The I Altered." Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. 185-207.

Delamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Pascoe, Judith. "Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace." Romantic Women Writers. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover: UP of New England, 1995. 252-68.


Robinson, Mary. Lyrical Tales. London: Longman, 1800. Full Text.


Wilson, Carol Shiner and Joel Haefner, ed. Re-Visioning Romanticism.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.


Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman, 1802. Full Text.

Political Radicalism and Feminism

Engraving by J.R. Smith, after a portrait by George Romney, from the frontispiece of the 1895 edition of Mary Robinson's memoirs.

Portrait of Marie Antoinette during her imprisonment by the Marquis de Brehan.

Robinson's belief in the potential influence and social responsibility of the poet is essential to her placement among the Romantics. During her involvement with the Della Cruscans, she showed that she shared in the clique's support for the French revolutionaries with her 1790 poem dedicated to Robert Merry, "Ainsi Va Le Monde." Robinson predicts a glorious future of freedom in the wake of revolution, writing in the final stanza, "Hark! Freedom echoes thro' the vaulted skies./The Goddess speaks! O mark the blest decree,--/TYRANTS SHALL FALL--TRIUMPHANT MAN BE FREE!" (In the 1806 edition of the Memoirs, Mary Elizabeth Robinson deleted this stanza, along with the dedication to Merry, as part of her effort to distill her mother's legacy from the taint of the Della Cruscans.)

By 1793, Robinson, like her fellow late-eighteenth century radicals, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, was disillusioned by The Reign of Terror. She wrote her "Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France" for Marie Antoinette, whom she had met during a 1783 trip to France. According to Robinson's daughter in the Memoirs, the Queen was much taken with the Englishwoman and made her a gift of a purse (195). Robinson responds to her acquaintance's execution by bemoaning,

Who can reflect, nor drop the tenderest tear,
On the dread progress of thy fate severe!
Hurl'd from the loftiest height of human bliss,
To the worst horrors of Despair's abyss!
To bear th' insulting cruelty of those,
Who, from thy subjects, to thy Tyrants rose!

As the sentimental concerns of the Della Cruscan poet are turned to the guillotine's victims, the formerly pressing necessity for righting the social order falls by the wayside. However, by the time of her death, Robinson does not seem to have entirely turned away from her republican principles or utopian hopes as did the Lake Poets over time. The posthumously published "The Progress of Liberty" continues to decry the way "Rebellion then/ Usurp'd the form of Freedom, whose bland soul/Shrunk at the boundless and licentious rage/Of lawless innovation." But the poet continues to hold out hope for a more meaningful and peaceful revolution that will result in a communal future. She writes,
 
[...]Prophetic hope
Beholds the heavenly vision, bleeding France,
Where o'er thy blooming vales and tawny hills
Thy pine-clad summits and thy yellow plains,
Thy peaceful tribes shall rove. The laughing throng,
Link'd in the bonds of social amity,
Live for each other" (82-3).

This utopian thinking was related to Robinson's project of exalting the place of the poet in general, and especially the woman writer. In the preface to her collection,Sappho and Phaon, she writes, "That poetry ought to be cherished as a national ornament, cannot be more strongly exemplified than in the single fact, that, in those centuries when the poets' laurels have been most generously fostered in Britain, the minds and manners of the natives have been most polished and enlightened" (12). Robinson thus participates in the construction of the narrative of the Romantic poet as an agent and provoker of liberal social progress. She sums up that position by arguing, "It is the interest of the ignorant and powerful, to suppress the effusions of enlightened minds: when only monks could write, and nobles read, authority rose triumphant over right; and the slave, spell-bound in ignorance, hugged his fetters without repining. It was then that the best powers of reason lay buried like the gem in the dark mine; by a slow and tedious progress they have been drawn forth, and must, ere long, diffuse an universal lustre: for that era is rapidly advancing, when talents will tower like an unperishable column, while the globe will be strewed with the wrecks of superstition" (14-5). 


The literature of sensibility becomes a liberating force in the face of political, economic, and gender-based-oppression. McGann writes, "[Robinson] takes it for granted--as everyone else at the time did--that sensibility is a feminized 'experience'. She is equally aware, however, that the philosophical discourse of sensibility has been dominantly masculine" (98). By seizing and altering that discourse, Robinson reveals that writing can serve as a path to liberation for women who have been oppressed by the patriarchal social order. She argues in her Letter to the Women of England, "The embargo upon words, the enforcement of tacit submission, has been productive of consequences highly honourable to the women of the present age. Since the sex have been condemned for exercising the powers of speech, they have successfully taken up the pen: and their writings exemplify both energy of mind, and capability of acquiring the most extensive knowledge. The press will be the monuments [sic] from which the genius of British women will rise to immortal celebrity: their works will, in proportion as their educations are liberal, from year to year, challenge an equal portion of fame, with the labours of their classical male contemporaries" (90-1). The list she gives of women writers in "On the Subordination of Women" constructs those individuals as a heroic company, amongst which she is pleased to place her real name. With the Lyrical Tales, she would seek to prove her point, by seizing her proper position at the forefront of English verse.

Works Cited

McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.


Robinson, Mary. A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. London: Longman and Rees, 1799. Full Text.

-- Sappho and Phaon. London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1796. Full Text.

Robinson's "poetical disguises"

In this 1782 cartoon by James Gillray, Robinson is depicted as tavern whirlligig hanging in the air between two notable men with whom she was romantically tied: the Prince of Wales and Banastre Tarleton.

This 1783 cartoon by B. Pownall depicts the Prince and Robinson in their roles as  "Florizel" and "Perdita." On the Prince's side, the King cries out at his bad behavior, while on Robinson's, her husband is branded the "King of Cuckolds," holding her other lovers upon his horns.

Robinson's long-delayed arrival into the Romantic canon was the result of, not only shifts in critical perspectives, but her own work at re-defining her place within the late-eighteenth century literary world. As shown above, Robinson was a frequent target of political cartoonists, known for her time as an actress and lover to the Prince Regent, as well as the other sordid love affairs that followed. It required a tremendous output to even begin to shift attention to her place as a radical feminist thinker and prolific writer of novels and poetry. But in her final years, Mary Robinson managed to make a living as a poet. At Daniel Stuart's Morning Post, for which she served as a poetry editor, she published 20 poems in 1798, 25 in 1799 and around 90 in 1800. 

Robinson's late career is inextricably tied to her participation in the Della Cruscan clique. The Della Cruscans, begun in Italy by a group of expatriate Englishmen and Italian collaborators led by Robert Merry, made their publishing debut with the Florence Miscellany in 1785. Their work, however, gained far more attention through reprints in the popular press. It was deeply sentimental, flowery in language, and committed to republican values. Role-playing was an essential aspect of Della Cruscan writing, and a major part of what made the mode attractive to both the poets and readers. From behind the guise of Della Crusca, Robert Merry could express both wildly sentimentalized emotional poses and radical political views in support of the French Revolution. The retired playwright, Hannah Cowley, became his lover, Anna Matilda, only to be supplanted by Robinson's Laura Maria. Their competition added drama and urgency  to the procession of poems, and Robinson's theatrical background likely helped her to construct a role for herself. 

Robinson embraced the Della Cruscan conventions, offering odes to reflection, eloquence, and meditation, as well as occasional poems, her lines frequently taken up with describing the author's passion and tears. In a poem from the February 23rd, 1790 edition of the Whitehall Evening Post, "Laura Maria" writes, "Come, blushing Rose--and on my breast/Recline thy gentle head and die,/Thy scatter'd leaves shall there be press'd,/Bath'd with a tear from Pity's eye."  But, despite the artificiality that Della Cruscan verse known for, this overwrought guise could also be used to make significant revelations of Robinson's personal life. This is clear in a poem like the "Lines to He Who Will Understand Them,"  first published in The World October 31, 1788. She bemoans her lover, Tarleton's, betrayal, complaining, "That truth, unwelcome to my ear,/Swells the deep sigh, recalls the tear" and prepares to leave the country altogether. Robinson, who had been so often attacked in the press for her love affairs, is able to reveal her own condition and sentiments (albeit in a stylized and dramatized form) to a reading public.

Laura Maria was just one of an entire dramatis personae worth of names Robinson published under, at least eight of which appeared in the Post. Others included Tabitha Bramble, who was credited, as Mary Elizabeth Robinson writes in her continuation of her mother's memoirs, with "lighter compositions," Sappho, Oberon, and the author of A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, Anne Frances Randall (230). But Robinson never seemed particularly interested in using her various pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. As Judith Pascoe argues, "That Robinson's theatrical donning and shedding of personae did not serve primarily as a form of subterfuge is evidenced by the way she invariably came out from behind the cover of each nom de plume" (Pascoe 263). Indeed, when she came forward as the author of her Della Cruscan poems, she was dismayed to find that the publisher John Bell did not initially believe her, thinking that he already knew Laura Maria's true identity. The preface to the 1795 edition of her Poems repeats this revelation, along with claiming poems written by "Oberon" and "Julia." And ten months after the first publication of the Letter, the second printing (with the title changed to Thoughts on the Condition of Women) gave Robinson's real name. The plethora of identities Robinson took on gave her the opportunity to take on a wide range of poetic voices while temporarily separating herself from her scandalous reputation. Inevitably, though, she tended to claim responsibility for her work, publishing it in the collections of her poems under her own name. The Della Cruscans offered her the opportunity to engage in this kind of play on a highly visible stage.  

However, as she neared the end of her life and career, Robinson felt the need to separate herself from a group that had become much maligned as purveyors sloppy sentimentality and limited craft in biting critiques from the satirist William Gifford and Wordsworth, among others. Mary Elizabeth Robinson insists that her mother became involved with the Della Cruscans because "dazzled by the false metaphors and rhapsodic extravagance of some contemporary writers, she suffered her judgment to be misled and her taste to be perverted" (215). But in many ways her association with the Della Cruscans was essential to her development into what we can consider a "Romantic" poet. Indeed, even as Robinson's daughter attempts to allay damage to her poetic reputation by downplaying her involvement with the Della Cruscans, she points out within the same paragraph, "During her poetical disguise, many complimentary poems were addressed to her: several ladies of the Blue Stocking club, while Mrs. Robinson remained unknown, even ventured to admire, nay more, to recite her productions in their learned and critical coterie." 

Given the cultural capital they, however briefly, held in the late-eighteenth, we certainly cannot dismiss the Della Cruscans. Arguing for the clique's significance, Jerome McGann writes, "One wants to understand Della Cruscan poetry because:1. it provides an invaluable corpus for studying the conventions of the poetry of sensibility; 2. understanding those conventions gives greater access to the work of the major poets who worked in the first phase of the tradition, that is, in the years 1760-1840. 3. understanding the poetry of sensibility in that period opens new avenues for (re)reading the poetry that succeeded it" (96). While his points are well-taken, McGann does place a heavy emphasis on treating these works as part of a narrative of progress toward high Romanticism. Rather than viewing these poets as an intriguing evolutionary dead end, we should focus on how they represent a confluence of social and historical factors in the early-1790s. It is against that background of jacobin thought that this soap operatic bunch of sentimentalists was able to assert a lasting influence on a writer like Robinson. 

Moreover, for the resourceful writer, the passing of a fashion and a critical dismissal does not have to be wholly destructive to one's work. Steven E. Jones points out the rhetorical maneuvers possible from such a position when he argues that, identified with the Della Cruscans by contemporary critics, "both Keats and Shelley collaborate in their own caricatures, offering themselves up as the victims of satire in order to stake out an unsatiric higher ground" (113) Robinson does not directly confront such attacks, but she continues to employ Della Cruscan techniques in order to support causes that, for her, transcend the playful dramatics of the clique. And her continuing awareness of the power in taking on various "poetical disguises," seizing and identifying herself with the new developments she saw approaching, allowed her to stay relevant and make a living at her writing. These considerations have served her well in posterity, while the other Della Cruscans still have not recovered from their consignment to the cultural dust bin. 

Works Cited

Jones, Steven E. Satire and Romanticism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Pascoe, Judith. "Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace." Romantic Women Writers. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover: UP of New England, 1995. 252-68.

Robinson, Mary Darby. Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Ed. J. Fitzgerald Molloy. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co. , 1895. Full Text.

The Unperishable Lustre of Mental Preeminence: Sensibility, Romanticism, and Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales

Thomas Gainsborough's 1781 portrait of Robinson, commissioned by the Prince of Wales. She holds a miniature of the Prince.

Introduction


From its establishment as a literary period through the retrospective lens of the Victorian Era, English Romanticism has been primarily identified with the Big Five, later Six, writers: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later Blake. But from the 1980s on, there has been a tremendous expansion in the attention paid to women writers of the period. This transformation in the canon is largely due to  the work of feminist critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Romanticists like Stuart Curran, who brought renewed attention to the work of such poets as Anna Letita Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Letita Elizabeth Landon, and Mary Robinson. Unquestionably it has been a positive step to open up the boundaries of the Romantic canon in this way. But it also leads to questions about what we accept as Romantic writing. Of course, most critics have long since accepted that Romanticism is a largely arbitrary idea. In his great attempt to develop an overarching criticism of the Romantics as a unified movement, M.H. Abrams failed to find room even for Byron. The dates given for the "beginning" and "end" of the period vary wildly (Should it be dated from the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads? Or perhaps the fall of the Bastille in 1792? Or as far back as 1760, to take into account the various forerunners of the canonical authors?). In any case, bringing these women writers into the canon only exacerbates such issues.

In his 1963 Fables of Identity, Northrop Frye introduced the idea of an "Age of Sensibility" immediately preceding the Romantic Period. In reaction to the neo-classicist aesthetic championed by Pope and Dr. Johnson, poets and novelists influenced by Rousseau and Locke produced works that glorified sentimentality and spontaneity. Frye warns against treating the work of this era as "pre-romantic," which would have "the peculiar demerit of committing us to anachronism before we start, and imposing a false teleology on everything we study. Not only did the 'pre-romantics' not know that the Romantic movement was going to succeed them, but there has probably never been a case on record of a poet's having regarded a later poet's work as the fulfillment of his own" (Frye 11). Frye's point is well-taken, but inevitably tends to fall by the wayside in the ways we discuss and teach late-nineteenth century literature. A few "poets of sensibility" are included in the Romantics volume of the Norton Anthology and a few of their poems are slipped into courses that still mainly focus on the Big Six. Articles tend to focus on the relations between the works of these writers and their male contemporaries or successors. Moreover, even when we accept necessarily reductionist constructions of literary history in order to render artificially neat "periods," poets like Blake, Smith, and Robinson remain standing on the threshold. 

The way to deal with these problems is to confront the "Romantic poet" as a construction emerging from a specific historical context and set of poetic principles and poses. While striving to avoid being trapped in the false narrative of progress which casts the poetry of sensibility as a mere stepping stone to Romanticism, I will argue that Mary Robinson worked to develop a public image of herself as a Romantic poet. The history of her reception exemplifies important problems in the ways scholars continue to think about and archive the period. I will focus mainly on Robinson's Lyrical Tales, the final work published in her lifetime, and one that operates within and demonstrates the slippage between "Romanticism" and the "literature of sensibility." Examining this work, and the context in which it was produced, allows us to explore how writers working in the late-eighteenth century constructed the poetic identity that we construe as Romantic.


Link to full text of Lyrical Tales through UC Davis' British Women Romantic Poets project

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.